How can I add an additional description to a Django field which would be stored in the database?

Question

I would like to provide context help for the input fields in my forms ("First name": "Your first name. Please enter all of them if you have several."). Instead of hard-coding them in source code, I would like to make those help texts editable through the admin interface. My idea is to somehow extend the field class (include a new attribute similar to verbose_name) and store that in the database (probably a three-column table 'Model, Field, Help' would be sufficient).

However, I don't know whether this is feasible or has been done before. Do you? Could you give me some to where to start if it has been not?

Answer 1

Every field in a form already contains help_text, though it should be declared as a parameter in the field, in the Form class.

E.g.,

class SomeForm(forms.Form):
    some_field1 = forms.CharField(verbose_name="Some Field 1", max_length=100, help_text="Please the first field.")
    some_field2 = forms.CharField(verbose_name="Some Field 2", max_length=100, help_text="Please the second field.")

Personally, I don't see the benefit of having it in the database rather than in the form tied to the field.

EDIT:

So you can override the help text. Let's say first imagine you had a dictionary for each form you want to override help_text in a form. Before rendering the Context, you could reprocess the form with the dictionary as such:

my_form = SomeForm()
for field_name, new_help_text in my_form_override_help_text_dict.items():
    my_form.fields[field_name].help_text = new_help_text

and then add my_form to the context before rendering it.

Now where and how you want to store the help text is your choice; e.g., your solution of creating a ModelFieldHelp with three char fields (Model Name, Field Name, Help Text) would work, then you need something like

class ModelHelpField(models.Model):
    model_name = CharField(max_length=50)
    field_name = CharField(max_length=50)
    new_help_text = CharField(max_length=50)

field_help_qs= ModelHelpField.objects.filter(model_name='SomeModel')
my_form_override_help_text_dict = dict([(mfh.field_name, mfh.new_help_text) for mfh in field_help_qs])

Now it may make sense to automate this process for all your models that you create forms for, by defining a function in the form or model that automatically creates these ModelHelpFields (if not defined) and updates itself with the current help text after being initialized ...